Editors Note: We have
reprinted one of Pete’s articles that can give some clarity
to living with mental illnesses.
We with this illness fear
that there will never be a place of safety and belonging for us.
Our experience of belonging seems conditional on our performance.
We feel as if we are valued for not making trouble and, if we amputate
our hearts and feelings, we minimize our undesirability and make
ourselves harmless. Only then can we take up space.
We learn to guess, try
to figure our place out, and try to earn it somehow. But we never
really feel we’ve found it, and it
seems as though we could be exiled at any moment. So we learn to
grab whatever is offered, thankful for being allowed to stay somewhere,
anywhere. This is how we define belonging: the temporary postponement
of certain exile.
Some of us try to earn
our place by being the clown, or the savior, or just invisible.
We clutter our lives with these strategies for belonging, trying
through some combination of performance and cleverness to make
ourselves look attractive and valuable so that those who “really” belong
will let us stay around. Some of us take what seems to be the only
other choice: self-imposed exile. With a good hiding place, we can
simply disappear in secret, avoiding the problem altogether. Some
of us hide out in our rooms, others in books, some with their pets,
others retreat into television or computer games. Some choose to
hide in their bodies.
When we are hiding out, waiting sometimes takes the place of belonging:
waiting to be discovered, waiting to be asked in, waiting for it
to be safe. Waiting and hiding are strategies of powerlessness.
Our history as a species is filled with conflicts between people
seeking a rightful place. Indians with Europeans, blacks with apartheid,
Jews with Nazis, women with men, rich with poor, we have been terribly
clumsy in allocating a place of safety; and we all seek refuge, a
home. Even Jesus was born a refugee, homeless among his own people.
But safety and belonging
are not freely granted by the world. Millions of homeless people
in our cities testify to the enduring truth of Jesus’ experience.
Millions of refugees worldwide reveal our inability or perhaps
our unwillingness to provide a homeland for all our children.
Any child in pain claims kinship with all others who live in exile
from true belonging. For those of us who have felt emotional exile
and isolation in our lives with mental illness/brain disorders, this
kinship is difficult to feel, hard to imagine. But it lies in the
heart of our Journey.
When we doubt our belonging,
we grow desperate, and we learn to grab almost anything—a job, a sexual partner, a gang, a therapist,
a lifestyle—and make that our place of belonging. In our desperation
we lose both our serenity and our sensitivity to the needs of others.
Yet no other human being can provide that belonging for us. They
are not in charge of granting us a place here, our place is already
given. Our challenge, our work, is to honor our place in this moment,
to breathe deeply, in the unconditional gift of home.
The search for a home
is an ancient spiritual metaphor. In the Hebrew story of Exodus,
God saw the suffering of the Hebrew slaves and promised them an
unconditional “land of milk and honey.” No matter
how unfaithful or sacrilegious they proved to be along the way, no
matter how much they complained about the difficulty of the journey,
the gift of belonging was never taken away. They were not given the
land as a reward for their performance; they were given the land
because they required a home.
The invitation to belong
is made again and again, but we must be able to hear the promise
and accept the gift. The journey to our home need not always lead
to a separate country or place. Sometimes it leads us to a still,
small voice within our souls, a place of belonging as sure and
quiet as our very breath. This search for home is essential to
our healing because finding a place where they let us stay is not
the some as having a place where we belong.
